Bank of America ("The Homosexual Bank") Pushes Gay Rights Agenda on Georgia Boy Scout group

A good reason to cancel your Bank of America account if you have one. Tell them that you are cancelling because you oppose discrimination against heterosexuals. They are responsive to pressure. They have stopped funding the Scouts before and then restored the funding. Post below lifted from Red State

A Boy Scout is trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind and - according to the Bank of America - discriminatory.

If you have heard of Valdosta, chances are it was because of the local high school football team's prowess at winning national championships. But today, the overbearing effects of overactive liberalism reached far into South Georgia and slapped the Boy Scouts right across the face.

At a recent Valdosta Kiwanis Club meeting, the local Boy Scouts leader, Matt Hart, was present to accept a donation from the Club. Matt gladly accepted the contribution to help the local Boy Scouts spruce up their summer camp and then he told the Kiwanis Club the Scouts were grateful for the donation because the regular donation received each year from Bank of America had been denied this year because Bank of America believes the Boy Scouts national organization discriminates against gays.

In fact, Matt, the Executive Leader of the Alapaha Area Council for the Boy Scouts, shared with the group a recent letter he received from Bank of America Charitable Foundation explaining the denial

“...Under the non-discrimination policy, the Bank of America Charitable Foundation cannot provide funding to any organization that practices discrimination on the basis of race, religion, color, sex, sexual orientation, age, national origin, ancestry, citizenship, or veteran or disability status. The Boy Scouts' current employment and membership practices do not comply with this policy.”

The letter continues:

“If the Alapaha Area Council, Boy Scouts of America has the autonomy to depart from the current discriminatory practices of the national organization, and will verify that fact in writing, the Bank of America Charitable Foundation may consider reviewing this request again.”

(Full letter here.)

This is absurd. The letter sounded like it had been written by an ACLU lawyer in San Francisco. And this is the same bank that donated $150,000 to a San Francisco Community Center “to serve the needs of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community.”

Andy Smith, the president of the Alapaha Council of the Boy Scouts of America responded in a letter:

“I think this policy and what this policy represents is an attempt to cause a serious erosion of personal freedoms, personal rights to associate, the right of parents to know that the Boy Scouts of America does everything it possible can to be as inclusive as it can be and still carry forward the traditional and applaudable character building programs of Scouting and to see to the safety of every child whose safety is entrusted to the Boy Scouts of America.”

(Full letter here.)

For nearly a Century, the Boy Scouts of America has “prepared young people to make ethical and moral choices over their lifetimes by instilling in them the values of the Scout Oath and Law” and has made leaders out of boys through traditional values. It's unfortunate that the Boy Scouts in Valdosta end up being the victims in this game of liberal cat and mouse.



OK TO INSULT CATHOLICS

One of the co-producers of "The Da Vinci Code," John Calley, was quoted last year saying the movie was "conservatively anti-Catholic." Leaving aside the silly qualifier, ask yourself: Is there a single producer in all of Hollywood who would boast that his movie is anti-Semitic, racist or homophobic? And to top it off, ask yourself why inoffensive depictions of Muhammad are rarely shown on TV or in newspapers?

The bias against Catholicism is palpable. No other segment of society is continuously the target of vicious jokes by the likes of Penn Jillette or Bill Maher. No other segment of society is subjected to the obscene assaults like those "South Park" delivers over and over again. And no other segment of society is routinely held up to derision on college campuses.

Consider that a student newspaper at the University of Oregon recently put a depiction of a naked Jesus Christ on the cross with an erection. It also showed a graphic of a naked Christ kissing a naked man, both sporting erections. And the response from the university's president? It was so weak that state lawmakers — after receiving color copies of the offensive pictures from the Catholic League — have decided to deal with this incident themselves. All because the president of the university found it politically incorrect to morally condemn the newspaper.

It's not just Catholics who are on the receiving end of these attacks — all Christians are fair game. NBC dumped "The Book of Daniel" because there was no audience for the script, but the producers surely thought there would be one. After all, who wouldn't want to watch a show where an Episcopalian priest dabbles in drugs, the wife is a boozer, the daughter is a dope dealer, one son is gay, the other is a womanizer, the brother-in-law is a thief and the father's father is an adulterer? Just your ordinary Christian family — in the eyes of Hollywood, that is.

To understand what's driving this, consider that our culture teaches that freedom means the right to do whatever we want to do and Catholicism teaches that freedom means the right to do what we ought to do. There's a natural disharmony here, a tension so taut that something's got to give. Never mind that a libertine idea of freedom — liberty as license — is spiritually, psychologically, physiologically and socially deadly in its consequences. It's what sells. Sadly, what is attendant to this perverse interpretation of liberty is a need to lash out at any creed that preaches the virtue of restraint.

The scandal in the Catholic Church did not help matters, but the frontal assault on Catholicism antedated the revelations of 2002. No matter, the kind of hate speech that spews with regularity toward the Catholic Church can never be justified. That it occurs amid all the chatter about tolerance and respect for diversity makes it all the more repugnant.

More here



Harry Reid & The End of Liberal Thought

By Dennis Prager

The highest-ranking Democrat in America, Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, described the Senate bill making English the national language of the American people as "racist." And the New York Times editorial page labeled the bill "xenophobic." Welcome to the thoughtless world of contemporary liberalism. Beginning in the 1960s, liberalism, once the home of many deep thinkers, began to substitute feeling for thought and descended into superficiality.

One-word put-downs of opponents' ideas and motives were substituted for thoughtful rebuttal. Though liberals regard themselves as intellectual -- their views, after all, are those of nearly all university professors -- liberal thought has almost died. Instead of feeling the need to thoughtfully consider an idea, most liberal minds today work on automatic. One-word reactions to most issues are the liberal norm. This is easy to demonstrate. Here is a list of terms liberals apply to virtually every idea or action with which they differ:

Racist
Sexist
Homophobic
Islamophobic
Imperialist
Bigoted
Intolerant

And here is the list of one-word descriptions of what liberals are for:

Peace
Fairness
Tolerance
The poor
The disenfranchised
The environment

These two lists serve contemporary liberals in at least three ways. First, they attack the motives of non-liberals and thereby morally dismiss the non-liberal person.

Second, these words make it easy to be a liberal -- essentially all one needs to do is to memorize this brief list and apply the right term to any idea or policy. That is one reason young people are more likely to be liberal -- they have not had the time or inclination to think issues through, but they know they oppose racism, imperialism and bigotry, and that they are for peace, tolerance and the environment.

Third, they make the liberal feel good about himself -- by opposing conservative ideas and policies, he is automatically opposing racism, bigotry, imperialism, etc.

Examples could fill a book. Harry Reid, as noted above, supplied a classic one. Instead of grappling with the enormously significant question of how to maintain American identity and values with tens of millions of non-Americans coming into America, the Democratic leader and others on the Left simply label attempts to keep English as a unifying language as "racist."

Another classic example of liberal non-thought was the reaction to former Harvard University President Lawrence Summers' mere question about whether the female and male brains were wired differently. Again, instead of grappling with the issue, Harvard and other liberals merely dismissed Summers as "sexist."

A third example is the use of the term "racist" to end debate about race-based affirmative action or even to describe a Capitol police officer who stops a black congresswoman who has no ID badge.

"Phobic" is the current one-word favorite among liberal dismissals of ideological opponents. It combines instant moral dismissal with instant psychological analysis. If you do not support society redefining marriage to include members of the same sex you are "homophobic" -- and further thought is unnecessary. If you articulate a concern about the moral state of Islam today, you are "Islamophobic" -- and again further thought is unnecessary. And if you seek to retain English as America's unifying language, you are not only racist, you are, as the New York Times editorial describes you, "xenophobic" and "Latinophobic," the latest phobia uncovered by the Left.

There is a steep price paid for the liberal one-wording of complex ideas -- the decline of liberal thought. But with more and more Americans graduating college and therefore taught the liberal list of one-word reactions instead of critical thinking, many liberals do not see any pressing need to think through issues. They therefore do not believe they have paid any price at all.

But American society is paying a steep price. Every car that has a bumper sticker declaring "War is not the answer" powerfully testifies to the intellectual decline of the well educated and to the devolution of "liberal thought" into an oxymoron.